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He didn’t win re-election, but A C Wharton says he did change the city’s politics in his six years as mayor.

“It would be the epitome of naivete to say that there are not some folks who still try to thrive politically on dividing us. I guess that will always be,” Mayor Wharton said in a Tuesday, Dec. 8, exit interview with The Daily News. “But by and large, I am convinced that most people are set on saying, ‘Let’s get along.’ It’s tough enough out there with us working together. Imagine what it will look like if we don’t. … I believe we are on our way.”

Mike Herbert, a Pan American Games gold medalist in kayak racing, will be the first to say that you just don’t know who you might meet on the water. All kinds of people step into a canoe or a kayak and get hooked.

The city’s tourism and travel industry is thriving as a one-of-a-kind destination for leisure and business travelers, but industry insiders believe a larger, technologically updated convention center is needed in years to come if Memphis wants to remain competitive in bringing larger groups to town.

The old adage “loaded for bear” is fitting for a new full-service branding agency that’s emerged on the Memphis advertising landscape.

“We came up with Loaded for Bear after stepping back and looking at the Memphis creative landscape and what our goals were, which are to prove that great creative can happen in a ‘creative wilderness’ such as Memphis, but also to help our clients be prepared for anything,” said managing director Joel Halpern. “That is where the term came from, an old hiker’s saying that means going off in the prepared for the worst case scenario, or a bear.”

With its own tax incentives, a narrowly focused group of development boards, a variety of neighborhood demographics and development clusters that run the gamut from commercial to residential, Downtown Memphis is a veritable petri dish of economic development.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – A comeback for old-fashioned paddlewheel riverboat travel on the Mississippi River continues this weekend with the departure from New Orleans of the Queen of the Mississippi, a brand new, quintuple-decked vessel mixing 19th century trappings meant to evoke the Mark Twain era with modern amenities including Internet access, satellite television, an exercise area and a putting green.

It was almost two years ago that Pinnacle Airlines Corp. began a transition. And it was a very different transition than the one the Memphis-based regional air carrier is now working its way through with supervision from a federal bankruptcy court judge in New York.

Riverfront Development Corp. is preparing for the next phase of Beale Street Landing: development of a riverfront park. The organization has filed a $9.8 million building permit application with the city-county Office of Construction Code Enforcement for the park.

As the American Queen steamboat docked Tuesday, May 15, at Beale Street Landing and left the same day for a trip to New Orleans, plans were under way for the restoration of another part of the riverfront just to the north – the cobblestones as well as a plaza and fountain at the foot of Union Avenue.

People who receive housing counseling before they borrow are much less likely to default. Research shows that 75 percent of at-risk homeowners who meet with U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development housing counselors and attend loss mitigation programs won’t be foreclosed.

About a year ago Memphians were drawn to one spot in particular on the city’s riverfront.

At the foot of Beale Street, the Mississippi River had risen last May to a level where the muddy water covered the intersection of Riverside Drive and Beale, offering a view of an uninterrupted river stretching three miles from the intersection to the levees in West Memphis.

A river view alone isn’t enough for a restaurant to make a go of it on the Memphis riverfront.

And there are many examples to prove the point.

The old Harbor Landing restaurant on Mud Island has a beautiful view of the Memphis harbor and a slightly more distant view of the Mississippi River. There was once an old towboat on the cobblestones that offered the pleasures of dining on its decks. And One Beale Street also came with a view.

The most recent figures from the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development show a falling jobless rate for the Memphis metro area.

New, more current figures will be out later this month that show the area’s latest unemployment picture. But in the meantime, the Memphis area has played host to one job fair after another in recent days, while across the state there have been more than 20 such fairs in the past 15 months.

Great American Steamboat Co., the enterprise that’s newly headquartered Downtown in One Commerce Square and which is bringing riverboating back to the Mississippi River, is planning to hire more than 300 new employees for “the grandest, most opulent riverboat in the world.”

NEW YEAR INDEED. As 2012 dawns, we’ll be able to see a number of things in a positive, new light – if only we’ll allow ourselves to look at it that way.

A Downtown icon that almost became a parking lot is now writing a new song, and praise will be offered in brand-new ways for architect Francis Gassner’s seminal and long-neglected C&I Bank Building. Positive change is being heard in the Visible Music College.

Despite hard times, local commercial real estate firms were able to ink plenty of deals in the past 12 months.

Memphis’ industrial leasing activity kicked off in January when Buena Park, Calif.-based Pacific Logistics Corp. signed a 60,000-square-foot lease in ProLogis Park DeSoto for its first Memphis-area location.

Recovery continues in the local hotel market, fueled in part by several Downtown luxury hotels that have experienced healthy business in 2011 and anticipate an even stronger performance next year.

Overall occupancy rate year-to-date for all hotels in the Mid-South is 59.4 percent, up from 57.6 percent last year at this time, according to third-quarter statistics from Smith Travel Research. The market’s average daily rate (ADR) has held steady since last year, hovering near $76, while revenue per available room (RevPAR) has jumped to $45.14, up from $43.81.

Long before the first widgets roll off the assembly line, way back before the ribbon cutting and the first shovels break ground, and even before executives quietly slip in to scout out a prospective piece of land, someone like Mark Sweeney gets a phone call.

The Greater Memphis Chamber has a new chairman of the board. Larry Cox, president and CEO of the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority, has been elected by the chamber board to succeed former Smith & Nephew executive Joe DeVivo.

Larry Cox, president and CEO of the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority, has been elected by the chamber board to succeed former Smith & Nephew executive Joe DeVivo. DeVivo now works for Albany, N.Y.-based medical device provider AngioDynamics.

As the local commercial real estate market approaches the end of 2011, experts say it appears to be in line with national fundamentals for secondary and tertiary markets.

Shelby County commercial sales in the third quarter were the highest sales volume since Q3 2007, with $259 million, according to real estate information company Chandler Reports, www.chandlerreports.com.

The day before Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam was the keynote speaker this summer at the Downtown Memphis Commission’s 2011 Annual Luncheon, he went for a jog in Nashville wearing his “Believe Memphis” Grizzlies T-shirt.

Talent acquisition and retention and an ongoing focus on sustainable workforce development are vital to the economic success of any city. And in Memphis – a city beleaguered by high rates of poverty and unemployment – long-term strategies aimed at building that workforce are now targeting future workers as young as middle school students.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) – The American Queen steamboat, whose home port is Beale Street Landing, will take part in the 50th anniversary of the Kentucky Derby Festival's Great Steamboat Race next year, along with the Belle of Louisville and the Belle of Cincinnati.

There are a lot of bare walls in the offices of the newest tenant at One Commerce Square. But the offices of the Great American Steamboat Co. have a river view and the lobby houses a scale model of the company’s chief asset – the largest steamboat ever built.

With the announcement that two grand steamboats will soon begin trolling the Mighty Mississippi past Memphis – one of which will make the city its home port – the last few weeks have brought news for the city’s riverfront that’s definitely made some waves.

With last week’s approval of up to $215 million in bonds for the city’s expanded Pyramid plus plans, the project Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr.’s administration describes as the other anchor for riverfront development has been moving in quieter waters.

The reversal of fortune for the Downtown tower at the intersection of Main Street and Monroe Avenue, until recently plagued by falling occupancy and an uncertain future, was set in motion in a private meeting one year ago this month.

The second-largest bank based in Memphis is coming Downtown. Independent Bank has inked a lease to open a bank branch in the lobby of One Commerce Square, in addition to space for the bank’s financial planning division on the tower’s 23rd floor.

The Greater Memphis Chamber could not exist without the support of its members. That is why every year the nonprofit economic development organization holds a membership campaign with the aid of its current investors to encourage new membership and spark growth.

The city of Memphis now owns a $9 million interest in The American Queen steamboat, the only overnight cruise boat working the Mississippi River when it leaves its Memphis port in April.

When the U.S. Maritime Administration signed off on the sale of the massive steamboat to HMS Global Maritime and its Great American Steamboat Co. subsidiary this week, it was a milestone in a complex, fast-moving deal.

The sale of the American Queen to the Great American Steamboat Co. for $15.5 million has cleared federal maritime regulators and the CEO of the company said today the first cruise from the Memphis homeport will be in April.

The day after the October 2009 special city elections, local Panatoni Development Co. LLC partner Al Andrews showed up at Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr.’s door notifying him of a site location specialist conference in Atlanta that displayed a map with big red circles around certain areas of the country as places to avoid. Memphis was one of those.

More than 30 visitors braved the sweltering summer heat on a recent Friday evening to immerse themselves in the stories of some of Memphis’ most famous, infamous and influential citizens during Elmwood Cemetery’s Evening Stroll.

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. told a minority business forum his administration will begin questioning those who want to do business with the city about their use of minority and locally owned businesses in general.

When Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell launch their joint office of sustainability this week, it will be the latest move in a continuing realignment of both local governments.

The overnight riverboat cruise business has certainly had its share of false starts in recent years. The trouble began in 2001, six years after The Delta Queen Steamboat Co. had the largest steamboat in the world built. The company went bankrupt and The American Queen went out of service.

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. Tuesday outlined a plan to Memphis City Council members to bring overnight and multi-night riverboat cruises back to Memphis as headquarters for the Great American Steamboat Co. The deal would also provide the funding to complete the stalled Beale Street Landing project.